Submit Your OpenPGP Public Key

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About

What is PGP?

PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is a method of encrypting and signing data (for example an email) in a secure “end to end” way. This means, the message is encrypted on your computer, using the recipient’s public key, in a way that the e-mail server has no knowledge of the content of the message. The recipient of the message then decrypts the message on their own computer using their private key.

OpenPGP software uses a combination of strong public-key and symmetric cryptography to provide security services for electronic communications and data storage. These services include confidentiality, key management, authentication, and digital signatures. This document specifies the message formats used in OpenPGP.

About the Server Pool

This server is a member of sks-keyserver.net pgp keyserver pools. The main hkp pool which you should configure your pgp software to use is pool.sks-keyservers.net, or perhaps subset.pool.sks-keyservers.net.

The available pools this server is a memeber of are listed below:

pool.sks-keyservers.net - The main pool

na.pool.sks-keyservers.net - Servers located in North America

eu.pool.sks-keyservers.net - Servers located in Europe

oc.pool.sks-keyservers.net - Servers located in Oceania

hkps.pool.sks-keyservers.net - Servers with HKPS (HKP over TLS) support

subset.pool.sks-keyservers.net - Servers that are running the lastest version of sks

ipv4.pool.sks-keyservers.net - Servers with an IPv4 IP address

ipv6.pool.sks-keyservers.net - Servers with an IPv6 IP address

p80.pool.sks-keyservers.net - Servers with port 80 open for HKP access

About this Service

This service may be withdrawn at any time and without notice to end-users. (Peers will be notified). End-users should use a pool definition above, such as pool.sks-keyservers.net which will alias into an operational pool.

Note: This service is provided free, to the public, in the hopes that it might prove useful. No warranty is provided, nor any offer of continuing service or access.

By using this service, you MUST understand that presence of data in the keyserver (pools) in no way connotes trust. Anyone can generate a key, with any name or email address, and upload it. All security and trust comes from evaluating security at the “object level”, via PGP Web-Of-Trust signatures. This keyserver makes it possible to retrieve keys, looking them up via various indices, but the collection of keys in this public pool is KNOWN to contain malicious and fraudulent keys. It is the common expectation of server operators that users understand this and use software which, like all known common OpenPGP implementations, evaluates trust accordingly. This expectation is so common that it is not normally explicitly stated.

Type the text you want to search for in the Search String box. If you want to look up a key by its hexadecimal KeyID, you have to prefix the ID with 0x

Select either the Index or Verbose Index check box. The Verbose option will display signatures on keys.

Press the Submit button.

The server will return a list of keys matching the search text. The page will have links for every KeyID, and every bracket-delimited identifier (i.e. <user@example.com>). Clicking on the hypertext link will display an ASCII-armored version of the public key.

Extraction caveats

The search engine is not the same as that used by the pgp program. It will return information for all keys which contain all the words in the search string. A “word” in this context is a string of consecutive alphabetic characters. For example, in the string user@example.com, the words are user, example, and com.

This means that some keys you might not expect will be returned. If there was a key in the database for Marc Edu <mit.foo.com>, this would be returned for by the above query. If you do not want to see all these extra matches, you can select "Only return exact matches", and only keys containing the specified search string will be returned.

This algorithm does not match partial words in any case. So, if you are used to specifying only part of a long name, this will no longer work.

Currently, hypertext links are only generated for the KeyID and for text found between matching brackets. (It is a common convention to put your e-mail address inside brackets somewhere in the key ID string.)

Submitting Keys

Submitting a public key allows other people to find and download the public key.

How-to submit a key

Cut-and-paste an ASCII-armored version of your public key into the text box.

Press Submit Public Key.

That's it! The keyserver will process your request immediately. If you like, you can check that your key exists using the extract procedure.

Submit a key to the pool

Enter ASCII-armored PGP key here:

Notice: When you submit a key to this server, either via the web interface or via HKP, that key will be propagated throughout the pool to various servers. That key will then be stored on each of those servers in addition to this server. Due to the transferring of keys between servers not managed by a central hosts, deleting a key is not possible at this time. If a key were deleted from this server, other servers in the pool will restore the key in order to maintain a complete collection. This is the servers intended behavior.

Guides

Open PGP Guides & How-To's

Below you will find my list of help files and guides for using PGP on your client and building new key servers.